Booksellers’ Stalls in the Kingdom of Ewistar, Part 2
In my last post (link) I described the booksellers’ stalls that the party visited in my main Dungeons & Dragons campaign and some of the books they found there. Because my player was looking for love poetry, that is what I focused on when making up literary works for the setting, but I knew that there would be other things for sale in those stalls and I should have material prepared in case the other PCs decided to look around. Here is what I prepared. Feel free to use and adapt any of it.
Printers at Work, c.1590, Johannes Stradanus
The Booksellers’ Wares: Plays
I intend to talk about plays at greater length, but for the moment it’s worth noting that you could buy the script of a recently-performed play in a bookseller’s stall in early modern England; some of them were bad plagiarizations and others were official.
Tragedies
Although we don’t often call things tragedies any more, it was once one of the most important dramatic genres, including in London of the 1590s, which is my most consistent touchstone for my D&D campaign. Most tragedies are about nobility, on the view that people of higher station in society have further to fall and therefore have more tragic potential, though there is an increase in tragedies about the middle class (as there was in the 1590s and 1600s in England).
- The Witch of Oakleisure: a tragedy about a town that provoked a witch with their poor behaviour (based on the early modern play The Witch of Edmonton by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford)
- The Tragickal History of Prince Galinndan: more usually called Prince Galinndan, it is a tragedy about an elf prince
- King Laucian, A Tragedy: a tragedy about a human king
- The Tragedy of Queen Torgga: a tragedy about a dwarven queen
- King Frath, A Tragical History: a tragedy about a human king
- The Scrivener’s Tale: a domestic tragedy about middle-class characters (named for a chapter from Wizards of the Coast’s 2021 Candlekeep Mysteries)
- The Forge of Fury: a tragedy about dwarves and duergar (named for a chapter from Wizards of the Coast’s 2017 Tales from the Yawning Portal)
Histories
In the 1590s, the history was a common type of play, so it seemed appropriate to me to include some. However, I did not bother coming up with much of a description for most of them.
- King Gorstag II
- Queen Jhessail I: one of a number of plays about historical queens written and performed since the young Queen Jovanna won her war of restoration and claimed her father’s throne from the usurper King Durmand
- Her Majesty, Queen Jhessail: a play about the same monarch as the one above, but by a different acting company
- The First Part of Gorstag III
- The Second Part of Gorstag III
- The Third Part of Gorstag III
- King Helm V
- Sir Malcer Brightwood: about the campaigns against remnants of a lizardfolk empire in South Frithland, one of the provinces of Ewistar
- Lady Valanthe Ilphelkiir: about the campaigns against the drow in North Frithland, one of the provinces of Ewistar
Comedies
Most comedies (which I discussed in the last post) are about romantic love, but not all are. I wanted to have at least one example in which romantic love was less important.
- A Friend In Need: a play with twins who swap places (based on Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, but named for a chapter in Wizards of the Coast’s 2018 Waterdeep: Dragon Heist)
Farces
I’m drawing the farces from a different time period entirely than the early modern period; these are instead based on the works of Athenian playwrights and the later Roman authors. As with the histories, I did not figure out what their plots might be, though in general you wouldn’t watch a farce for the plot anyway. All of the titles are chapter headings from Wizard of the Coast’s Waterdeep: Dragon Heist.
- Dragon Season
- Spring Madness
- Hell of a Summer
- Maestro’s Fall
- Winter Wizardry
The Booksellers’ Wares: Patters
Patters are broadsheets, essentially like pamphlets or newsletters that would be for sale in a bookseller’s stall. Broadsheets were most often sold with the lyrics to songs, but a patter was prose, either making an argument or related public events.
Polemical
Patters, or pamphlets, were a common means of disseminating ideas in early modern London. (Much more recently one of my players wondered if an NPC would be familiar with the phrase “swallowed a pamphlet” and I said that they would not only be familiar with the idea, but they’d be more familiar with the idea than most people today.) Puritans often used pamphlets, so I think of polemical patters as dogmatic and moralizing, though I can’t say for sure that they all were. (The titles of both are taken from Wizards of the Coast’s Candlekeep Mysteries.)
- A Deep and Creeping Darkness: a diatribe against republicanism
- The Prince of Beauty: moralizing tales about cosmetics and shallowness
Current Affairs
Journalism arguably began with these patters, but they were very much yellow journalism.
- Alarums and Excursions: stories about Queen Jovanna’s war of restoration and its aftermath, sensationalized and of dubious veracity
Spiritual
Some patters were essentially what would later be called tracts, that is, works of religious instruction or exhortation. In the Kingdom of Ewistar, however, these would be polytheistic or henotheistic rather than Protestant. (The titles, again, were taken from Wizards of the Coast’s Candlekeep Mysteries.)
- Lore of Lurue: various stories told about Lurue
- The Book of Inner Alchemy: a pamphlet advertising a religious handbook
The Booksellers’ Wares: Histories and Folktales
Finally, we have prose non-fiction books (rather than patters). Though histories and folktales are not entirely interchangeable in an early modern setting, the line between is not so clear as we imagine it to be today, so I have them grouped together. As with the works above, the titles are references to Dungeons & Dragons books.
- The Unicorn and the Hags: a collection of folk tales, including the eponymous story and also “Castle in the Clouds,” “Greenest in Flames,” and “Palace of Heart’s Desire”
- The Orrery of the Wanderer: a travelogue and atlas
- Mission to the Barrier Peaks: a history intended to be hair-raising
- The Ooze-Flooded City: a history intended to be hair-raising
- The Sunless City: a history intended to be hair-raising
- Book of the Raven: a history of the Raven Queen
Of these, player characters would go on to purchase Book of the Raven (though much later).
As I said last time, there are some things I would do differently now. I would not borrow chapter titles from Wizards of the Coast books quite so liberally. More importantly, though, I think I left a lot of opportunities undeveloped here. The party is now starting to get involved in aristocratic politics; I had not prepared any of that yet when I invented these titles, so I was not able to use the histories and tragedies to foreshadow factions and dynamics among the nobility. If you decide to do something like this yourself, I highly recommend you take some time to think about what historical events matter in your setting, and what aristocratic families trace their lineage back to such moments, when making the history plays and tragedies. However, the problem is that most of us develop our campaign’s setting as need arises, so we can’t always know in advance what we’ll want in later months and years.
Now, I did have some successes here. A Deep and Creeping Darkness, the diatribe against republicanism, did plant seeds for a later plot point, though, when the party learned that the queen wants to implement a parliamentary system after spending her formative years exiled in a republic. My only regret is that I didn’t find a way to press a copy into one of the PC’s hands. As I mentioned, one PC now has a copy of Book of the Raven, which allowed him to better understand a rumour he had heard about certain grey elves. Finally, one of these texts has content that might interest another PC, though her player doesn’t know that yet.
Coming from a different angle, I also wish I had spent some time thinking about the themes of each play. My players do not need a synopsis for any of them, nor would it be worth my time to make one up, but I could easily tag each with one or two preoccupations and concerns: maybe King Frath’s tragic flaw is mistrust while King Laucian’s is gullibility. Even a little detail can create the illusion that these are real texts in a real literary scene. I think making the world feel lived-in is valuable in itself, even without using these details to reveal or foreshadow future characters and plot points – though if you can do both, that’s great.
Of course, even if my players never visit a bookseller again, they will quite likely encounter a street performance of a play, so I still have an opportunity to develop the literary culture of Ewistar. Next time I will talk a bit more about how I see the theatre of Ewistar.
See the series index (link).
*Originally published 19 February 2024.